Monday, December 14, 2015

A few days ago, a friend posed three questions about the practice of mindfulness and the Christian faith. These seemed like good fodder for a blog entry. I'll start with the questions:

How do you think mindfulness and the Bible
relate instead of contradict each

other?

How do you utilize mindfulness as part of
your spiritual life, quiet time, as a way of connecting with God?

Why do you think some Christians have issues
with regarding mindfulness?

1.I
think we probably have to admit that mindfulness, in at least a technical way,
comes from Buddha’s teaching, namely part of his Eightfold Path. But, for what
it’s worth, Buddha wasn’t probably trying to create a different spiritual
tradition, but more of what we might call psychology. Today his teaching been further secularized in the particular practice of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), to be sure, and has become a practice that we, as Christians, need
to see whether it’s effective and consistent with what we believe. I can't see that it's much different from applying Myers-Briggs categories to Christian life, for example. If
there’s truth to be found in any endeavor, then we as Christians are right to
follow it.

John Calvin put it so well in the Institutes:

“If we
regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject
the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to
dishonor the Spirit of God.”

With this in mind, I would say that mindfulness
does not contradict biblical teaching, but is consistent with a stilled mind
(Psalm 131). In that it empties ourselves of destructive thoughts, it
is therefore more of a preparation for prayer that prayer itself. Or if it
is a form of prayer, it’s really close to centering prayer in the Roman Catholic
tradition (Thomas Keating would be a resource here.)

2.I
use mindfulness throughout my life daily as a way of calming myself. If
I’m starting the day right, I do a brief (1 minute) clearing of my
thoughts and thus my "concerns/anxieties."Important note: this can be the same word in the Bible
and thus not always negative—e.g., Philippians 2:20 “concerned” and
4:6 “be anxious”. It is similar to what I learned in Marjorie
Thompson’s Soul Feast about “prayers of consciousness”—i.e.,
meditating on the state of your mind. If I make time, I may take about 3-5
minutes through a variety of mindfulness techniques, often as a preparation for
other forms of prayer. One I enjoy is imagining my thoughts as clouds and then
attending to them, without judgment, until the sky clears. (But there are
others.) I then try to bring the practice of mindfulness into my day in an ad
hoc fashion—e.g., when I’m brushing my teeth or generally when it’s a simple
activity that I can do easily; when I find myself in a place I can find
stillness while waiting for something to happen (maybe for a haircut, even
waiting for a doctor); when engaged a particular activity (such as eating), I
seek to bring my mind to a state of being undivided and focused; when my heart
is beating too fast and I need to return to my breath. So, all in all, my
actual technical practice of mindfulness is limited (maybe 5 mins/day), but I
bring it into several other parts of my day.

3.Christians’
issues with mindfulness usually relate, in my experience to a concern that we
want to do God honor and not let alien spirits into our lives. Something from
Buddhism may be disrespectful and even dangerous. Mindfulness “empties” our
mind and opens us up to all sorts of influences. This resistance is also
summarized in a slogan like “If it’s not found in the Bible, it’s not ok
for Christians.” Instead, I would rather say (with many others like Calvin), “If
it’s consistent with, or even doesn’t contradict, the Bible rightly
understood—and if it’s true—then we as Christians are obligated to follow it.” This in a way is common sense: how could God address all the issues believers through time would face
in one book (or even better, a collection of 66 books)? It’s not possible. But,
to some degree, this resistance is about a wider posture of relating to the
world around us, and I feel generally confident that Christ has come into the world and is "the true light that enlightens everyone" (John 1:9). At the end of the day, I'm confident that God’s Spirit and people will help us discern
what’s true and what’s not.

Wednesday, December 02, 2015

I'm working on
an article that compares Karl Barth and Alfred North Whitehead and offers some
conclusions for 21st century theology. On the way toward its completion (which
is not imminent, by any means), here are some excerpts...

Who is God, what is the world, and
how do the two relate? Certainly they have woven through my mind and created a
winding path of challenge, perplexity, and discovery. It could even be argued
that, in some way, these questions animate all of Christian theology. And
sometimes when I wonder about the most fruitful next direction for theology—and
really Christian thought generally—I’m concerned, even a bit dismayed, that
there seems to be no clear guiding voice at the moment leading us forward. To
state what others have decreed, we have no Reinhold Niebuhr or Paul Tillich
that guides our discipline today as those voices did in the middle of the last
century.

For that reason, I will take the
approach of looking backward and seeing what we can learn from two voices that
set out two distinct poles for theology, namely the master of confessional and
Reformed theology, Karl Barth, and the mathematician cum philosopher and
theologian, Alfred North Whitehead. And it leads to a central question: Is
there a way forward theologically that allows for a “thick description” of the
reality of God revealed in Jesus Christ and that also takes in the insights of
science? Incidentally, in
mentioning “two poles” in theology, I suppose I am arguing for a very Barthian
concept, a dialectic—one, in this case, that’s defined by two essential
opposites. This project is embedded in conviction that neither of the two
opposites has all truth.

Here then is my thesis: The way forward for theology in the 21st century
is recognize some areas where these two great voices found common agreement and
then head in a double movement (or “two ways at once”). To find a path that
takes in both confessional theology, best exemplified by Karl Barth, and is in
constructive conversation with other forms of human knowledge (such as
science), exemplified by Alfred North Whitehead....

I do not know all the ways that
heading two directions would work out, but I can sketch some contours. First of
all, theologians will flourish when they go deeply into their own theological
sources and create a rich and thick description of the God they know in Jesus
Christ. At the same time, they will find fruitful work as they engage with
other forms of knowledge, such as science and literature and philosophy. And in
this regard, Whitehead’s philosophy is particularly useful.

In a word, what I’m saying is that
Christian systematic theology has as its task to be mindful of the world
around, and those theologians who are mindful of the world of culture have as their task to
be related to the specific event of Jesus, to the “tremendous fact” of
Christianity. Or as Whitehead phrased it:

It starts with a tremendous notion
about the world. But this notion is not derived from a metaphysical doctrine,
but from our comprehension of the sayings and actions of certain supreme lives.
It is the genius of the religion to point at the facts and ask for their
systematic interpretation. In the Sermon on the Mount, in the Parables, and in
their accounts of Christ, the Gospels exhibit a tremendous fact. The doctrine
may, or may not, lie on the surface. But what is primary is the religious fact. (Religion in the Making, 50-1)

This tremendous fact is indeed, in
Barth’s theology, the place where we understand the nature of God.

The meaning of [Jesus Christ’s]
deity—the only deity in the New Testament sense—cannot be gathered from any
notion of supreme, absolute, non-worldly being. It can be learned only from
what took place in Christ. (CD IV/1, 177)

What can be taken away from this
common point of agreement, and more specifically from the doctrine of God when
Jesus becomes the means of inquiry? That’s one of the questions I’m still
working on.